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So, I have been tasked to do several things on my work experience. There are currently PDFs uploaded on the company website. These are troubleshooting and technical/release documents are titled by the main topic of their focus (such as 'Building a Query'. However, these documents tend to mention or cover another topic along with the one primary to the document such as 'Running a Query'.

My tasks are:

  1. Add keywords or tags to these PDFs that consist of the topics covered in each PDF.
  2. Add some sort of search engine or similar utility from which a user could search for 'x' and see all the PDFs mentioning 'x'

I'm starting from the ground up, so any ideas are welcome.

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If your starting from the ground up, Wordpress has lots of plugins available that will get you up and running quick...heres one for PDF search https://searchwp.com

While i have not used this plugin it seems to have the functionality you want.

If you are new to wordpress you got a little bit of a learning curve ahead, but there are plenty of resources out there and some great themes available from places like themeforest.net.

Hope that helps;)

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  • With a bit of research you may even find a free search plugin, or a plugin that will search tags of your uploaded PDFs
    – WebStudio
    Commented Jul 20, 2015 at 17:26
  • SearchWP is quite good. If WP is an option, definitely consider it. Even allows for weighting and synonym mapping (a search for 'toad' includes 'frog'). We use it on ecotrust.org and it indexes PDFs very well. There are some that it chokes on and I haven't had the time to sort out why but with hundreds of PDFs on the site and 5-10 not being indexed I've filed it under no-big-deal. It does allow you to add text to a particular PDF's meta data so that it might search that instead. Good stuff! PS. I don't work for them. :)
    – Will
    Commented Jan 17, 2016 at 12:55
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Google also lets you create a search for a singe website only, you can create a hyperlink (link) in a document which would bring up a search, eg

https://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:stackexchange.com+filetype:pdf&lr=&hl=en&as_qdr=all

Google also provide a Custom Search Engine that involves a small amount of code being added to the company website it's pretty simple to do.

This brings up the Advanced Search box in google with the website already set to stackexchange.com and the type of file set to pdf. Adobe.com may also provide more information since they are the creators of Adobe Acrobat which creates pdf files. In Adobe Acrobat - full version not the reader - you can set the properties and keywords for each file. Other PDF writers should let you do the same.

If the PDFs are scanned images of type writer written documents (or obvious photos of printouts) rather than editable text you can use the Optical Characte Recognition (OCR) scan in the software to get the text electronically recognized ready for searching.

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